


north/south

by fullborn



Category: Fargo (TV)
Genre: Biting, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Time Loop Tornado, wound care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:34:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29255301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullborn/pseuds/fullborn
Summary: No matter how hard he tries, Rabbi can’t outrun the storm.
Relationships: Constant Calamita/Rabbi Milligan
Comments: 9
Kudos: 11
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	north/south

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arbitrarily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/gifts).



> I saw the phrase "Time Loop Tornado" and instantly knew I had to offer this. Hope you enjoy!

The eye of the storm opens up. The Em & Henry Filling Station fragments around him, freshly-painted planks, gas tank, clapboard sign, and the very ground beneath his feet all stripping upward into the air as Rabbi watches the man in the long red coat bare his wolfish teeth and laugh. He’s still laughing when the sky takes him. This isn’t how he thought it would end, for either of them. He’d expected more blood than this.

Rabbi watches the dark funnel twist and churn itself above him. His feet leave the ground. He closes his eyes and lets the storm batter his head and his legs and his arms as it pulls him effortlessly up his strange death.

***

After the first few times he stops feeling afraid.

 _Tell the boy I’ll be right back,_ he had said, and fuck him if that hadn’t turned out true after all. He wakes in his bed in the Barton Arms, still convinced he can feel the wind ripping at his skin, but all is quiet apart from the sound of the boy’s breathing and the sleep-snuffling of the dog; each time it takes him a solid few minutes to remember where he is. It’s always the same day. The last one.

No matter how hard he tries, Rabbi can’t outrun the storm.

He tries the first time to take Satchel and get out of dodge, money be damned, but the car breaks down two miles down the road and he’s forced to sit there and watch the tail of the tornado advance toward them while the boy tries to hide the fear in his face. He never wants to see that again. It’s best that he revisits the past, follow the day to where it crosses Calamita’s murderous path. Predictable as the storm itself.

Rabbi loses count of all the ways he dies. Gutshot and bleeding from Calamita’s pistol. Struck in the head by a nailed-up board. Run down in the road. Clutching at Calamita’s fine leather shoes with his throat slit and blood welling up in his mouth. With both hands around Calamita’s throat.

Once, to his surprise, Cannon’s man gets up and shoots Rabbi in the back, right when he's watching Calamita choke on his final breath for what may well be the hundredth time. Just to keep him on his toes, not that it makes much difference. The whirlwind takes them either way.

Rabbi’s getting tired of the whole damned thing, wishes he could just stay dead if it’s all the same result, but he’s caught up in the spin and doesn’t know how to pull himself free. To his credit, Calamita looks like he enjoys it each time around, getting to try to kill Rabbi. Looks like he’s enjoying it even as he bleeds out himself. Rabbi always thought he looked like a sallow grim reaper: gaunt enough, and morbid enough for the picture to stick, Italian enough to look like he just stepped from one of those ornate renaissance paintings with a grin on his face and a knife in his hand. His own personal angel of death.

“Why couldn’t you just leave us be?” Rabbi asks him, on a particularly bloody go-around. He’s exhausted. The wind shakes the snow from the trees and tugs at his coat. “Getting me, that’s all well and good, but can’t you let the kid be? He’s had enough. He’s out. You don’t get to go near him.”

“Vaffanculo,” Calamita chokes. He rolls over and spits blood at Rabbi’s feet. ‘You mick bastard.’

“Yeah, fuck me agus mo leanaí. Heard that one before.” The ghost of his father must be having a good time, watching Rabbi reap what he’s sowed. He doesn’t believe in purgatory. But if he did, it might look something like this.

***

“It’s my birthday,” says the boy, sadly. At least he has that dog to hold onto once Rabbi’s gone. _Again._

“I know, kid. I know.”

Rabbi dies in the filling station with his pockets filled to the brim with chocolate bars. He wakes with nothing to give. “I’ll get you something,” he promises, before the kid has even rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “I’ll get it if it kills me, understand?”

It does.

***

The goddamn billboard sets him off. He’s passed it an uncountable amount of times, those stupid faces staring blankly up at the storm-grey sky with identical vapid smiles. THE FUTURE IS NOW. Like hell it is.

“It’s just a sign,” the workman points out, lowering his paste-brush and looking accusingly at the fresh bullet holes peppering the painted figures to his left. “Not even finished putting it up yet, and you do a thing like that. They’ll probably deduct it from my pay.”

“It’s bullshit, that’s what it is.” Rabbi lowers his gun, breathing hard and shallow. “The future isn’t now. It’s the past we’re living, can’t you see? How’s it allowed, putting that up for people to see when it’s nothing more than a bald-faced lie?”

“Son, you’re not making any sense. ”

“Neither does that sign.”

“The point may stand, but still. There’s no point getting ticked off about it before you know what’s written.”

“I know what it goddamn says.”

The man sighs and turns to peer down at Rabbi, like an old schoolmaster, eyes a startling ice blue in his weatherbeaten face. “It doesn’t cost anything to look,” he says. He says it in Yiddish.

Rabbi realises he can’t remember what he looked like, all those times before. Words fail him, so he just stands there and watches the old man stick the last square of paper onto the corner of the billboard. It now reads: THE FUTURE IS CERTAIN.

“I don’t understand,” Rabbi says.

“The following ten infinitudes are held to be true: the beginning infinite. The end infinite. The good infinite. The bad infinite. The height infinite. The depth infinite. The East infinite. The West infinite—”

Rabbi’s finally going mad. He has to be. The floorboards under his life—or rather, his death—have finally given way and he’s falling into great unknowable depths. A great darkened storm cellar. 

“What?”

“Infinite, meaning certainty? Or infinite, meaning open to possibility? This may not be the future you think you’re looking for, but it’s not the past either. Unless you want to tell me we’ve had this conversation before, in which case I’ll call you an unlearned fool to your face.”

“I have to go. I’m sorry. There’s someone waiting for me.”

The man smiles and takes a sip from the hip-flask in his shirt pocket. He squints up at the clouds and calmly says, “The boy or the man, I wonder?”

Rabbi’s tongue is sandpaper in his mouth. “How do you—?”

“That one’s marked, like Cain.” He mimes a circle on his cheek, voice turning kind. “But you’re the kind of man that looks like he knows all about that. If this is the future you better start acting like it. Quit doing the same thing over and over again, is what I’d do; world only ended in flood the one time after all.”

The storm gathers on the horizon. When Rabbi looks again, the old man is gone.

***

“Hang on,” Rabbi calls, right as Calamita wheels around and clips him with a bullet, and he returns fire on instinct. He hears Calamita grunt in pain, shelves clattering to the ground inside the filling station. Rabbi curses and throws down his gun. “I’m asking you not to shoot, you dumb wop. You hear me?”

“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Why don’t you find out?”

“For Pete’s sake, just let me come in without blowing my head off. Or at least wait a minute before you do, if you’re dead set on it.”

There’s no answer, so Rabbi ducks through the door and steps over the unknown Italian’s corpse. Calamita is sprawled on the floor with one hand pressed to his leg in an attempt to stem the dark blood soaking through his fine twill pants. The other hand holds his gun, which is aimed squarely at Rabbi’s chest.

They stare at each other for a long tense minute. Finally Rabbi says, “Storm’s coming. The cellar’s our best bet.”

Calamita barks out a laugh. “We’ll both be dead, anyway. You’re shot in the gut, see? The right way for a traitor to go. Painful. Long in the dying. I’ll be gone before you are. Leg has all kind of arteries, fast blood. Quick to go, unlike some.”

He tries to grin. A fox caught with its leg in a trap with no way out.

Rabbi crosses the room. An iron ring, when pulled, reveals a darkened stairwell set beneath the floorboards like a stairway to hell. He kicks the gun from Calamita’s slack grip and drags him into the cellar, half-lifting him under his armpits while Calamita thrashes and curses in incomprehensible Italian. The wind howls outside. Muffled slightly by the closed trapdoor.

“Just like a coward,” Calamita hisses, “to crawl into a hole to die, in the dark.”

“Shut up. There’s got to be a light around here somewhere.”

The cord under Rabbi’s groping fingers. He pulls it and a dim lightbulb flickers on, illuminating a cluttered unfinished room stacked with boxes and oil drums. Calamita sits stiffly the corner, blood already pooling in a puddle around his feet. 

He should let him die. It’d be quieter. Calm for a few minutes at least. But Rabbi can’t ignore the weight of the old man’s words sitting stone-like in his stomach, boring into him with the same terrible strength as Calamita’s depthless stare.

“I’m trying something new,” Rabbi explains. He undoes Calamita’s necktie, wraps it around his injured leg and knots it tight. The skin of the man’s throat looks oddly bare without it. Sallow and spotted with sweat, tensed with pain. Rabbi could crush his windpipe with both hands and Calamita would be unable to stop him.

“Testa di cazzo, that costs more than your miserable skin,” Calamita spits. “Try for some sense.”

“I left most of it behind, back when I decided to try save your rotten life. Forgive me if I ain’t sorry. Would you stay still, goddamn it?”

There’s blood all over his hands now, Calamita’s or his own he can’t tell. The light dips in and out as the ceiling shudders and dust rains down on their heads as the wind wails louder than before. He’s seen the man injured, sure, in the normal course of Calamita’s job as enforcer and professional ballbuster, but never so exposed and at the sole mercy of Rabbi's care. It’s dangerous new territory.

“Some people might think killing your own father would make you into a man, but no, with you it just made you weak,” Calamita groans, tipping his head back and panting through the pain. “Always so sad, so ashamed of killing. Trying to make up for it by taking Cannon’s boy, refusing to shoot that other one, trying to save those that can’t be saved. You fall for it. Always see poor little lost-boy Milligan instead of the enemy.”

“I’m not ashamed,” Rabbi rasps. “I do what needs to be done.”

“Well, you should be. For letting him get close.”

Calamita pushes himself forward, sudden and jerky as a puppet with its string cut. He sinks his teeth into Rabbi’s shoulder. Grabs a handful of Rabbi’s shirt and sinks his fingers into the hole torn in Rabbi’s stomach, holding on with preternatural strength as Rabbi yelps and tries to shove him off. It’s pain close to fainting. His vision swims before him: Calamita’s sharp profile cut in shadow, his neck straining and his teeth red with blood, collapsing to the side, panting; the ceiling cracked and splitting open like ice on a pond.

The whirlwind, having found them at last.

***

The Barton Arms, refuge to the road-weary and the strange. Of course it’s only a matter of time before the devil shows up on their doorstep.

Rabbi and the boy descend the stairs for breakfast to the split dining room, to the same old spread: toast the consistency of drywall, oatmeal thick enough to use as mortar. Rabbi’s sick to death of it; Satchel, though, leaps to his seat with such anticipation a less knowledgable observer would swear Rabbi is in the habit of starving his ward. Rabbi gives the kid’s chair a gentle admonishing nudge.

“Glad you could join us!” trumpets the tiresome Mr. Swindell. “Course you’ve already met me and Hickory, you’ve met the Roanokes, the Major, his darling niece Millie. Got one newcomer today on the East side, this gentleman who has yet to share with us the honour of his name—”

The gentleman in question meets Rabbi’s appalled stare with a barely concealed smirk.

“Niccolò Abruzzo. At your service.” 

“Why, I swear that’s an Eye-talian accent I hear. What is it you do, Mr. Abruzzo?”

“Men’s shoes, didn’t you say?” interjects Rabbi, trying to quell the fear rising in his chest. “Can always tell a salesman, so it's said.”

A flicker of annoyance flashes, lightning fast, across Calamita’s gaunt face. “I confess, yes,” he concedes, smoothly. “Finest Italian leather from Montegranaro, for finest shoes.”

“Then you’ve already met Mr. Duffy’s acquaintance, how excellent! Should’ve guessed your trade from that fancy getup you’re wearin,’ as befits a man of fashion.”

“I could do with a new pair of Oxfords,” says Pastor Roanoke. Calamita ignores him.

Calamita leers at Satchel and Rabbi across the table the whole torturous breakfast, insouciant as he toys with his knife, sleeves of his silk shirt rolled up to his forearms. Rabbi curses himself for leaving his holster upstairs. There’s no possibility that Calamita is unarmed, despite his casual display — if not a gun tucked into his belt, than a knife tucked into his boot. Rabbi slips his own cutlery off the table and into his lap. Satchel, for his part, digs into his breakfast like it’s his last, staring at Calamita with rabbit-eyed wariness as if the man might lunge across the table at any moment.

“Do tell a story, Uncle,” pipes up the little girl, same as the night before. “A story for the road.”

Rabbi clenches his fist. He can’t face a repeat of the night before: that story and the memory of his father’s breath in his face, thick and rancid as old meat. The gun in his hand. _Time for bears to be bears._

“You want a story? I got one for you, bambina,” Calamita says. “How’s this. Once upon a time, something happened that was so in-explicable it made lots of people very confused for many years after. You know this word, inexplicable? Too confusing for words. A mystery.”

“Like a detective story?” asks the girl.

“Exactly like a detective story. So this detective, he’s not very smart. He lives in a small town: not much happens, until one day he gets this call from his friend, a farmer. _There’s a man in my yard,_ says the farmer, _and he’s been shot dead._ So the detective goes, and he looks, and sure enough there’s a man dead in the yard. No blood. Just body.

Maybe someone dumped him afterwards, he thinks, and goes about his job, until he gets another phone-call. Another body. Same as the first: shot, no blood. Broken bones. And another, and another, miles apart. Five bodies in total. Two Italian, two black, and an Irishman.”

“Sounds like the setup to a joke,” chuckles Mr. Swindell, a mite uneasily. “You sure this story’s kid-friendly, friend?”

“No joke. This really happened,” Calamita says without expression. “See, our detective doesn’t believe in coincidence, not here, but can he figure out what connects these men together? No. Even worse, he finds a gun one one of the dead men, same one that was used to shoot another. They seem to have killed each other. Five miles apart.”

“Was it aliens?”

“You hear this story and you think little green men, a spaceship? Che cazzo, no. _”_

“What’s that fella saying?” yells the East Sister. “He speaking English?”

“He’s says it ain’t aliens, ma’am.”

“Well what’s he saying that for? Where’s the point in saying what it ain’t?”

Rabbi grips his knife and waits. Calamita shrugs expressively, eyes sly as he takes in Rabbi’s schooled lack of emotion. It's been nearly two decades since Rabbi was wet behind the ears and easily set on edge by such a look, but the heart of it remains the same: a challenge, set from boredom or amusement, as part of some inscrutable trial. Rabbi refuses to rise to the bait. 

“It’s a tornado,” Satchel says quietly. “They killed each other and a tornado came and picked them all up.”

“Clever boy,” murmurs Calamita. He chuckles, and Rabbi wishes he was just like the rest of them. A stranger. Good-looking in a sinister sort of way, slightly off, intriguing in his speech. Someone to remember in other boarding houses in more fortunate times: _I met a strange man once, with a scar on his face, and he told me a strange story_. Nothing more than that.

The table descends into chatter, the two sisters relaying the same half-yelled questions to each other, with poor Swindell caught in the middle as interpreter. Rabbi slips from his seat without excuse and propels the kid midway toward the stairs before he feels a hand close tight around his arm.

“Going somewhere?” Calamita purrs. His nails manicured, clean cut against the black material of Rabbi’s shirt.

Rabbi turns, ready to swing with the butter knife, but a cough from the receptionist’s desk stops him from sinking it into Calamita’s eye. “East,” says the lady, eyebrows raised, pointing at the line on the floor. “And West. You best get that foot back over the line, sir.”

Calamita looks down at his shoes. “How thoughtless,” he tsks. “My apologies.”

He lets go of Rabbi and steps back, performative in his contrition. Rabbi shoves Satchel behind him, hand splayed across the boy’s shirt. He can feel the jackrabbit thrum of his heart beneath. Whatever happens, he’s not going to let the kid get done to him what’s been done to Rabbi countless times. Not a chance in hell.

“Let me get this straight,” he says, allowing himself some anger. “All this time, you remember? The same fucking thing over and over again, same for you as it is for me, and you still insist on coming after the kid?”

“Same as what.”

“Don’t play games. You know how it all turns out.”

“You got to say, Irish, this is new. I like this place. Bargain deals, good conversation. Old friends.”

“Leave the kid be.”

“How do you know this all doesn’t come to an end once I kill him, huh? Might be worth a shot.”

“Take that idea and shove it up your ass. You ain’t gettin’ near him.”

“That’s really how you want it to go? Hey, kid,” says Calamita. He smooths his necktie and spreads his hands out. “How about another story? Short one, this time.”

Satchel shakes his head.

“Ah, but this is a good one. You know who used to live in Italy, before the fascists and the peasants and the old men popes? The Romans. These Romans, the same people who put Christ on the cross. Not very nice, no? My ancestors. For entertainment, they watched fighting. Vicious and scared men made to fight the other.” Sweat trickles into Rabbi’s collar as he watches Calamita pace the line, graceful and deadly as a caged panther as he spins his tale. “The victor would turn to the audience, who would decide with _pollice verso_ — a turned thumb — whether or not the loser would die. An act of mercy, or an act of cruelty?”

“Get to the point already, would you? You’re boring the lad to tears.”

“You can’t tell, is what I am saying. Cruelty or mercy. There’s only so much to go around, see? Spare the boy, that still leaves you. An act of mercy, an act of cruelty.”

Rabbi throws his blunt knife down.

“Then get it over with, if that’s what it takes,” he says. “Just let the boy go.”

There’s a long moment as Calamita takes out his own blade and polishes it on his shirt with excruciating slowness, considering Rabbi like a piece of meat; how best to carve him up, flense the skin from his bones, leave him bloody and formless at his feet. Something hot uncoils in Rabbi’s belly. A phantom pain from where Calamita had dug his fingers into his gut before, sparking in tandem with the place where his teeth had bit into Rabbi’s shoulder. There was no mark. He knew; he’d checked. Still, the thought of it makes him itch.

Calamita hefts the knife from one hand to the other, and as he does, winces. Frowns as he staggers to the side, clutching at his back, the corridor deathly silent apart from the wet sound of metal slipping from muscle and flesh as Satchel pulls the knife Rabbi had given him from its home between Calamita’s ribs.

“Crossed the line,” huffs Calamita. “There’s a clever boy.”

“I did what you told me. Thigh, stomach, chest,” the kid mumbles, staring as Calamita crumples to the floor, his silk shirt soaked in blood. Rabbi’s frozen to the spot.

“Good lad,” he chokes. “You did good.” 

The kid gives up the knife without a fight. There’s something to worry about there, in the stony way he looks down at the man he has killed, but there’s no time now, not with Calamita coughing up blood onto the wooden floorboards at their feet. Rabbi pats the boy on the shoulder, sinks to his knees.

It’s goes against his better nature, putting his hand out and carefully placing it on Calamita’s shoulder blade. A dying dog can still bite. A dying man can still be dangerous in his way, though in what way Rabbi doesn’t know. The danger comes from the impulse that makes him do it in the first place; that weakness inside. He doesn’t get to do this.

Rabbi lifts Calamita’s head into his lap, smooths back his hair so that it’s just so. Stupid to give the man his vanity, now, but it’s all he can think to do; he keeps petting at his hair and hoping beyond hope that Calamita is already dead.

The painted line stretches out beneath them. Rabbi can’t help but feel that he’s crossed it in more ways than one, as he considers the window and the tornado-green sky beyond. Next thing he knows he’ll be letting the devil use his backbone for a ladder.

***

“You’re getting soft,” is the first thing Calamita says to him when they meet again on the road. He’s sitting under the billboard, hat tilted low over one eye like the sharp-drawn villain from a pulp magazine. Cigarette propped on his lip. If Rabbi didn’t know better he’d think it coincidence, happening on each other like this, but of two things he is certain: storm-clouds are gathering on the horizon, and Calamita, like fate’s right hand, has been waiting for him.

“Sure. I’m the cowardly lion and you’re the one without a heart.”

“Carved it out like an apple,” Calamita drawls. “Bitter core, bitter seeds.” He glances up at the poster. “What do you think this means, anyway?”

“Haven’t a bull’s notion.”

“ _Future is Now._ American nonsense. Doesn’t even say what it’s selling.”

“Who says it’s selling anything? Could be a message from God.”

“Then He doesn’t know what He’s selling.”

“Peace. Forgiveness. Died-for your-sins, the old college try, like.”

Calamita makes a face and flicks the cigarette into the snow heaped at his feet. “Shitty salesman, if that’s all He’s got. Tell me this, Irish. You lost your fear, or you lost your mind?”

Rabbi lifts his arms to show he’s unarmed as he steps closer, shivering in his coat. “It kind of wears off, after a the fiftieth time or so,” he concedes. “You don’t like that, do you?”

“Not so much.”

“Why don’t you try giving me something to be afraid of, then.”

A smirk crosses Calamita’s face, as Rabbi knew it would, puckering the corner of the ugly red scar burned into his cheek. Rabbi lifts a hand and brushes his thumb over the skin there. 

“That hurt?”

Calamita doesn’t answer, just gets slowly to his feet so that he stands at his full advantage, expression closed and calculating as he sinks his teeth into the web of skin between Rabbi’s thumb and forefinger.

Rabbi flinches. Lets him draw blood before pulling back his hand. Predictable that way, the blood between them. Perhaps his disappointment shows in his face, because Calamita seizes him roughly by the collar and shoves him against the billboard’s slatted frame hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs. The cold air stings his face, his hands. Calamita presses close, lip curled in a grin, and gently runs his tongue over the base of Rabbi’s throat.

He feels his Adam’s apple leap at the touch, betraying his surprise. There’s something terrible about the slow way Calamita works his way upward, nipping at the skin, insistent but careful in the application of his tongue. Rabbi can feel his dick, unworked and lonely thing that it is, begin to stir against his leg. It would be easier if it hurt. If he didn’t want it.

The realisation would make him laugh if it wasn’t so cruel: Calamita is gutting him easier than he would with a blade, exposing his tender insides and taking him apart with nothing more than his mouth. Worse of all, Rabbi lets him.

That is, right up until Calamita makes to press their faces together. Of all the things he imagined Calamita taking, and in all the ways, he never imagined this. It’s perverse. For men of their profession, who expect the fist and not the glove, to walk the boundaries of violence and find them nothing more than chalk-lines on the ground; easy to step over and easier to ignore. He tries to twist away. Calamita seizes him by the hair and holds him still and breaks his mouth open against his. Rabbi bites down, tastes blood. Mingling with their spit in a harsh burst; just a little more blood between them.

Calamita grunts but keeps at it. Rabbi supposes that’s how things would have kept on until the storm came and claimed them both, dragging them both up together, their bodies dashed in the wind. Perhaps in one of these deaths they ended up side by side. No such thing as impossibility, is what he’s learned.

Something hits the billboard above them and falls into the road.

“The fuck?” breathes Calamita. The sky darkening above them.

Another thud, followed by another. The roadside filling with the sound of impact, wet meat on tarmac. Rabbi steps away from shelter of the billboard and sees—

A fish, flopping in the middle of the road.

Calamita approaches it slowly, flicking open his knife. The fish heaves its sides, gaping up at them with dull eyes, shit spattered across its body. Calamita slices it open belly to fin and lets the innards slip out at their feet, red and stinking.

“Seems real enough to me,” Calamita says, while the fish rain down around them. “What do you think, Irish?”

The fish land battered in the snow and spatter against the billboard, obscuring the message in bloody tracks and shattering the panels like so many heaven-borne bullets. Calamita laughs, sheathes his knife.

Rabbi turns his face up to the sky as the fish fall down, no deafening eye of the whirlwind this time, just fish falling in their numbers to die in the flat fields of Liberal, Kansas.

“It’s something different,” he murmurs. “It ain’t what it was. We best take shelter, in case we live.”

**Author's Note:**

> \- Quotations taken from Sepher Yezirah trans. by Isidor Kalisch. New York, 1877. References made to various seasons of Fargo. 
> 
> -Comments appreciated :)


End file.
